Nassim Tableb on how to read

Nassim Taleb spends 30 hours every week reading books.

Here are 27 reading tips from @nntaleb:

1) The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether.

2) The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading.

3) A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

4) I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.

5) The reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once.

6) A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.

7) Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there.

8) Drink old wine. Read old books. Keep old friends.

9) Read nothing from the past one hundred years.

10) Never read a book that can be adequately summarized.

11) Never read a book you would not reread.

12) No book that can be shortened survives.

13) Books that endure don't look like good books; they are almost always very poorly written, but address fundamental topics.

14) What matters for a book is depth and relevance, which is extremely rare. Plus internal, not external coherence. Books that have them don't need the cosmetic shit.

15) When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice.

16) Keep the book. Easier to remember contents just by looking at it. Often not even necessary to consult notes.

17) I don't remember what I learned in class. I remember much of what I read on my own.

18) To become a scholar, spend decades reading 30-40 h/week.

19) You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

20) I don’t read newspapers. I don’t watch television. I’m not on Facebook. I don’t care for the social networks. I’m on Twitter, but I use it only as a means to an end. I read books.

21) Books are not read by the majority because they read the Internet, which is like junk food for the mind.

22) The unread books on your shelf are like a universe of alternate possibilities waiting to be explored.

23) I divide my spirits into two categories: those I read for the pleasure of reading and those I read for the pleasure of rereading.

24) To see if a book is real, ask 10 people of different backgrounds & professions to summarize it. If the summaries are similar, the book will not survive as it can be shortened to a journal article.
The more the summaries diverge, the higher the dimensionality of the book.

25) If you want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don’t necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible. Or read commentators on the classics who were doers themselves, such as Montaigne—people who at some point had some skin in the game, then retired to write books. Avoid the intermediary, when possible.

26) Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book. Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her.

27) A novel you like resembles a friend. You read it and reread it, getting to know it better. Like a friend, you accept it the way it is; you do not judge it.

Curated from Alex & Books @AlexAndBooks_ on X